Posts Tagged ‘street fighter 4’

Last week at PAX East 2013, Capcom announced that Street Fighter 4 will be getting yet another update, and furthermore, is seeking fan feedback with regards to which balance changes they’d like to see for each character.

Since then, hundreds of players with varying skill levels have flocked to the Capcom-Unity forums in a bid to have their voices heard. Whether or not this is good for the game, who can tell at this point? However, I firmly believe that whilst there is likely to be a mound of near-sighted and otherwise terrible ideas, there will also be some absolutely golden suggestions scattered here and there, and I hope that Capcom can tell the difference between decent and awful.

My opinions

Whilst I don’t play the game so much these days, I still vigorously follow the competitive scene via streams of weekly events such as the Next Level Battle Circuit and most major tournaments, as well as participating in various message-boards and reading related articles. Due to this, I have a rather solid understanding of the current state of the game at the higher levels.

So, what do I believe should be changed in this update?

Generally, I feel that the Ver. 2012 update brought about the largest list of tournament-viable characters out of any previous iteration of Street Fighter 4, and that only minor tweaks need to be made among the vast majority of the cast.

However, there are some characters that I believe should definitely be nerfed. These characters are Akuma, Cammy, Fei Long and perhaps even Adon and Seth. They are all quite simply too strong – or have the potential to be. This is a direct result of their very abuse-able options, which provides them with unfairly high rewards for very little risk. I could go into specific details for each case, but I feel that my blanket statement is better suited to this post.

When you consider how close-knit the vast majority of the character roster seems to be in terms of balance, the nerfs to these top-tier characters would automatically boost up the tournament viability of everyone else. This type of forward-thinking is a key point that everybody needs to consider when making these balance suggestions, as it would be counter-productive to unnecessarily buff a character after their most troublesome opponents are nerfed.

All in all, it will be interesting to see which changes do end up making it into the next version of Street Fighter 4, but I am also somewhat anxious as I know that properly keeping the balance of 39 vastly different characters is a very daunting task to accomplish.